Chair: Heribert Hirt, INRA, FR.
Novel strategies to improve stress tolerance in plants
MAP Kinases are important stress regulators - they are activated once the environmental stress signal has been received by the plant's receptors.
Chiara Tonelli, University of Milano, IT. Presentation
Plant productivity (EPSO Ghent Workshop)
Chiara described the workshop as a 'Think Tank' to explore mechanisms that control plant growth. The outcomes of the workshop stressed how important it is to continue all 'omics' research.
Mark Fennell, University College Dublin, IE.
Unravelling the impacts of climate change on plant invasions at the ecosystem scale: experimental and modelling approaches.
Mark described his new modelling system for predicting alien species invasion. He carried out his field data collection in Ireland using Gunnera plants.
Chair: Ian Woodward, University of Sheffield, UK
Climate, ecosystems and genomics
Ian opened his talk with an overview of climate changes over the last 40 million years. He summarised that species redistribution is climatically driven and global diversity can be somewhat predicted with this type of data.
Jenny McElwain, University College Dublin, IE.
Response of biodiversity and ecosystem function to past global warming events
Jenny presented her work, based in Greenland, on fossil layers dating back to 20 Billion years ago.
Gail Taylor, University of Southampton, UK
Understanding plastic and adaptive plant responses to climate change using molecular genetic and genomic approaches
'.....we know little of genetic variation in time....'
Alexander Platt, Gregor Mendel Institute, Vienna, AT
Population structure and gene flow in Arabidopsis thaliana
to come...
Chair: Bernhard Schmid, Zurich, CH
Plant Diversity effects
Bernhard described the rise of systems biology and biodiversity research. He continued by asking why or if we should have an eco-systems biology.
Hugh W. Pritchard, Royal Botanical Gardens, UK.
Characterising seed biodiversity for functional performance under saline conditions
This presentation opened with an overview of world salination problems - almost 80 million hectares of agricultural land is affected by increasing salination levels and it is clear then that we need to develop seeds that are more salt stress tolerant.
Jelena Aleksic, Belgrade, SB
High genetic diversity, cryptic genetic structure and complex dynamics in a stenoendemic |Serbian spruce present in the Balkans over a long time
Jelena outlined the distribution and abundance of the Serbian pine and concluded that there is high genetic diversity, cryptic genetic structure and complex population dynamics in stenoendemic Serbian spruce present in the Balkans over a long time.
Chair: Jan Traas, Lyon, FR.
From gene networks to morphogenesis
The problem of determining growth patterns is that not all cells are distinguishable - particularly on the meristem. However, Jan described several ways of solving this issue to measure more cells.
Jane Langdale, University of Oxford, UK
Evolution and development of leaves
Jane opened by posing the question of 'what are the mechanisms underlying: gametophyte vs sporophyte body plans; unicellular vs multicellular sporophytes; simple vs complex meristems; microphyll vs megaphyll leaves?'
Dani Zamir, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, IL
A phenom networks view of the magic of heterosis
Using Solanum lycopersicum x S. pennellii hybrid species of tomato, Dani showed the progress of mapping consistent heterotic QTL and subsequent yields from such hybrid species.
Ruben Gutzat, ETH Zurich, CH
Plant Retinoblastoma Related Protein controls seeding establishment after germination
pRb, the first Retinoblastoma protein was discovered more than 20 years ago for its tumor suppression activity during retinoblastoma. Ruben found that RBR binds directly to promoters of genes that get repressed via H3K27me3 after germination.